Apple's long-promised Siri overhaul is finally in the public's hands. On Monday, July 13, 2026, Apple seeded the iOS 27 public beta, opening its rebuilt Siri to non-developers for the first time. The public build is identical to developer beta 3, and it represents the first broad test of the assistant Apple has spent more than a year rebuilding.
What the new Siri does
The revamped assistant is designed for natural, ongoing conversations rather than one-shot commands. It adds on-screen awareness (acting on what you are looking at), personal-context search across apps like Mail, Messages, Notes and Calendar, and the ability to take multi-step actions in and across apps through App Intents. A new standalone Siri app keeps an iCloud-synced conversation history, and Visual Intelligence brings camera-based queries.
Under the hood
The system runs on Apple Intelligence Foundation Models on-device, backed by Private Cloud Compute for heavier requests — infrastructure that, per reporting, is partly distilled from Google Gemini. It requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, launches in English only, and is not initially available in the EU.
The road to release
A public beta is not the finish line: Apple is targeting a general release this fall, alongside the iPhone 17 cycle already in market. Opening the beta now lets Apple gather real-world feedback — and scrutiny — on features it first demoed long before they were ready to ship.
Why it counts
After a bruising stretch in which Apple delayed key Siri features and watched rivals sprint ahead, putting a genuinely agentic assistant in millions of hands is a credibility test. An assistant that can see the screen, understand personal context and act across apps is exactly the on-device agent battleground where Apple's tight hardware-software integration should be an advantage — if the shipping version lives up to the demos.